The Dish

Alec MacGillis has a terrific, granular and vivid take on Christie’s entire career in New Jersey, and Beau Willimon might take a look at it for a new drama series. It proffers an answer to the key question floating around in my head since Bridgegate: if that kind of petty politicking was Christie’s mojo, why did we not see that scandal coming? Where are all the other incidents of palm-greasing, threats, and payback? If Christie were that tawdry a public official, why did he have such a great rep for targeting corrupt pols?

MacGillis’ answer is pretty simple: Christie targeted lots of petty corruption, removing large numbers of small-time bosses for various shenanigans, while leaving the big bosses intact. And those big bosses in New Jersey’s rich panoply of appointees, commissions, and government grants helped him govern the state. So he both targeted petty corruption and chummed it up with those with the big sticks and greatest leverage over the state (almost all of whom were and are Democrats). He wasn’t a Robespierre targeting every machine pol; he was a Machiavelli targeting the least powerful bosses by aligning with the much more serious ones:

The problem with Christie isn’t merely that he is a bully. It’s that his political career is built on a rotten foundation. Christie owes his rise to some of the most toxic forces in his state—powerful bosses who ensure that his vow to clean up New Jersey will never come to pass. He has allowed them to escape scrutiny, rewarded them for their support, and punished their enemies. All along, even as it looked like Christie was attacking the machine, he was really just mastering it.

The piece draws on MacGillis’ deep knowledge of New Jersey politics. And it has some wonderful vignettes of the various bosses in Christie’s empire – chief among them, George Norcross:

In the early 2000s, several New Jersey attorneys general investigated whether [Norcross] had pressured a Palmyra councilman to fire a city solicitor, Ted Rosenberg, who wasn’t cooperating with the machine. Wiretaps offered a rare glimpse of a man completely convinced of his power. “[Rosenberg] is history and he is done, and anything I can do to crush his ass, I wanna do cause I think he’s just a, just an evil fuck,” Norcross said. In another conversation, referring to then-top Jersey Democrats, he declared, “I’m not going to tell you this to insult you, but in the end, the McGreeveys, the Corzines, they’re all going to be with me. Not because they like me, but because they have no choice.” While discussing plans to remove a rival, he exclaimed: “Make him a fucking judge, and get rid of him!”

Some of Christie’s tactics were truly brilliant, Francis Underwood maneuvers. By the end of the piece, I both better understood why the Romney campaign decided not to go there and also began to appreciate the kind of bare-knuckled politicking that enabled Christie to get shit done in the Garden State. Which is to say that MacGillis’ piece both explained why Christie would be a corrupt and impossible president, but also perhaps a brutally effective one.

(Photo: Scott Eells-Pool/Getty Images)

Responses are pouring in to the permanent resident from India who wrote, “I fail to understand why amnesty for illegal immigrants is assumed to be a force for the good. Why should we reward people for breaking the law? And why is it so unacceptable to ask immigrants to learn English?” One reader:

While I understand the Indian immigrant’s very justified frustration, his arguments against amnesty based on the rule of law miss an important point. The immigrants in question paid to travel from their places of origin to the United States because there was work to be had. And who provided that work? It was us, as a society. We were willing to look the other way when our farms hired migrant workers to bring in the harvest; when our landscapers hired day laborers without green cards; when our hotels and restaurants and meatpacking plants and retailers hired workers who they knew would do more work for less money and who had a strong disincentive against complaint if conditions were bad.

If we would punish those who came to fill the demand we placed as a society, shouldn’t we punish those responsible for that demand? And if we are unwilling or unable to punish those who willingly exploited this failure in the name of profit, why should we punish those who were exploited?

Another writes:

I think these types of questions have a flawed premise. Rather than asking “Why can’t they just learn English?”, we should be asking “On what moral and ethical basis can we exclude anyone from migrating to our country?” As long as the people in question are acting in good faith, and want to come to America with the intention of working and securing a better future for their family, what right do we have to refuse them?

Another:

Many years in this country apparently did not teach your reader the finer points. I am from India as well. I came here for school, and when a company offered a job, I stayed. It’s been about 17 years now. Somewhere along the way, I applied for the green card, and then citizenship, all like clockwork. All went through, at considerable costs. These are not cheap or easy processes, especially if you go through a lawyer. And that gave me perspective.

For many from Mexico or Central America, these costs can hardly be borne without breaking their meager savings. They trekked across and made this dangerous journey, all for a better life. Not for mansions, just to work at a mansion. Not for enjoying the finest cuisines, but to work in the kitchen. They have higher goals, I am sure, and I wish them the very best to get there. The person from India thinks nothing of speaking English, or a few other languages. This is just not possible for an average immigrant who crossed the Rio Grande in desperation.

I wish the reader would learn what America means truly to a lot of people before he gets naturalized – and I promise, it is not “I came here in a plane with papers, and you did not!” or “I speak English, and so should you!”

On that note:

We are not lowering the bar by failing to mandate English; we would in effect be dramatically raising the bar beyond anything we have required of previous generations. First-generation travelers from Europe and Asia were just as likely to establish conclaves built around their former homelands’ cultures and languages as modern-day arrivals do. Why do you think we have sections of major metropolitan cities and states referred to as Little China or Little Italy or Pennsylvania Dutch Country? Why are those areas considered fantastic islands of preserved culture and a core part of the Americana, while Little Havana or Little Haiti are disparaged as as problems of failed assimilation?

Another adds:

This has been true since 1753, when Ben Franklin wrote of German-speaking immigrants:

Few of their children in the country learn English. … The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some cases only German. … Unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so outnumber us [so] that all the advantages we have will, in my opinion, be not able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.

But an American abroad argues that a language requirement would be “pro-immigrant, in that it should reduce the risk of social isolation, victimization, or helplessness in dangerous situations”:

I’m am American living in Italy, which within the past few years has instituted a language test requirement for all who apply for long-duration residency. The test itself was much easier than I anticipated: present tense only, checking one’s ability to comprehend brief written and verbal passages on topics like grocery shopping, job openings (as if they exist here), and the weather – things one needs to understand to function anywhere. Then you had to write a brief “postcard” to a friend describing your new “job.” Based on the names on the roster, many of them started life with a different alphabet, either Arabic or Cyrillic. Of the 47 other testees in my group, only one failed.

Without any demonstrable language skills, one is far more likely to be taken advantage of, if not outright exploited. People need to be able to call the police or ambulance, understand job terms, navigate basic transactions, speak with a doctor. You don’t need fluency or an advanced vocabulary, but you do need to be able to connect in some elementary way with the people around you for a sense of social inclusion as well.

After watching the Netflix documentary Mitt (seen above), Batya Ungar-Sargon notices that the film barely covers the candidate’s religious life:

It’s no wonder Romney appeared wooden to voters; he had to hide a major part of what motivates him. Yet even here in the hearth of the Romney clan, while glimpses of religion are central to [filmmaker Greg] Whiteley’s portrayal, the family’s Mormonism is hardly on display. It’s surprising how the documentary, whose creator, Whitely, is himself a Mormon, casts a sanitized gloss on the religious moments, all of which are themselves highly unspecific. One could watch this film and never know that Romney is a Mormon (except when he calls himself “the flipping Mormon”), which suggests that even in a film purporting to be an intimate portrait of Romney, some things are still off-limits, and get edited out.

But why?

Did Whiteley fear that the film’s largely sympathetic portrayal of Romney would be compromised by overtly Mormon scenes? How much of this narrative decision was informed by Whiteley’s own Mormon background? Would the intimacy viewers feel watching this lovely portrait of a close-knit family potentially have been disabled by the specifics of the Romney’s Mormon faith? Unfortunately, because Mitt doesn’t deliver on this front, we’ll never know.

In Whiteley’s words:

My initial attraction to Mitt was his Mormonism. I’m Mormon and I remember my dad telling me the story of [Mitt’s father] George Romney when I was a little kid. I remember being very surprised to learn that there was an actual presidential candidate — and not just any presidential candidate, but someone that was actually a legitimate contender, a front-runner…

The documentary prompted Alex Beam to speculate that Mormon leaders might have been relieved that Romney didn’t win, since a victory would have brought “another order of exposure entirely” to the church:

While it is true that many wealthy Mormons, such as the Marriott family, or JetBlue founder David Neeleman, donated lots of time or money to Romney’s campaign, the church remained neutral. The church, which takes stands on some political issues, for example, on same-sex marriage, says it doesn’t endorse political candidates, and Romney was no exception.

“No one would ever come out and say it, but I suspect what you are thinking is probably true,” says Matthew Bowman, a Mormon professor of religion and author of “The Mormon People.” “The whole Romney campaign was a shock to the system for a church that generally wants to move very slowly and is used to hashing out things out internally over a long period of time.”

Speaking of Mormon history, Doug Gibson reviews Some Savage Tribe: Race, Legal Violence and the Mormon War of 1838, a new article by T. Ward Frampton in The Journal of Mormon History. Previous Dish on Mitt here and here.

A recently deciphered Mesopotamian tablet offers yet another alternative telling of the flood story – and at 3,750 years, it predates the Genesis version we know so well. Mark Esposito is enthused:

The find is important because it points up the similarities in the ways ancient cultures viewed the world and coped with its unpredictable circumstances. Seeing themselves as pawns before angry gods and survivors of catastrophes beyond their control empowered these civilizations and brought disparate tribes together. Indeed, some scholars have opined that a function of ancient religion was to galvanize groups of humans with a common ancestry and belief system regardless of the effects of geography or political culture. The flood story seems have served that function many times over as it spread throughout the Fertile Crescent into Egypt and North Africa and beyond. You can read about flood stories around the world here. There are hundreds.

British Museum curator Irving Finkel, author of the forthcoming The Ark Before Noah, explains what makes this new story unlike the others:

When the gods decided to wipe out mankind with a flood, the god Enki, who had a sense of humor, leaked the news to a man called Atra-hasis, the ‘Babylonian Noah,’ who was to build the Ark. Atra-hasis’s Ark, however, was round. To my knowledge, no one has ever thought of that possibility. The new tablet also describes the materials and the measurements to build it: quantities of palm-fiber rope, wooden ribs and bathfuls of hot bitumen to waterproof the finished vessel. The result was a traditional coracle, but the largest the world had ever dreamed of, with an area of 3,600 square meters (equivalent to two-thirds the area of a football pitch), and six-meter high walls. The amount of rope prescribed, stretched out in a line, would reach from London to Edinburgh!

To anyone who has the typical image learnt from children’s toys and book illustrations in mind, a round Ark is bizarre at first, but, on reflection, the idea makes sense. A waterproofed coracle would never sink,and being round isn’t a problem – it never had to go anywhere: all it had to do was float and keep the contents safe: a cosmic lifeboat. Palm-and-pitch coracles had been seen on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers since time immemorial: they were still a common sight on Iraq’s great waterways in the 1950s.

Leonid Bershidsky chronicles the rise and fall of the touchscreen sensation:

[Dong] Nguyen, who claimed he was making $50,000 a day from in-game ads, appears to have taken the game down for ethical reasons. On Feb. 10, the 29-year-old developer explained what exactly it was he “couldn’t take” to a Forbes reporter in Hanoi who spoke to him in Vietnamese. He was smoking nervously and had to put off the interview because of a meeting with a deputy prime minister.

“Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed,” Nguyen said. “But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem.”

The American Psychiatric Association has so far declined to include computer game addiction to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Still, some studies have shown that game addiction and substance dependence may share the same neurobiological mechanism. In effect, Nguyen felt he was selling the equivalent of drugs, and that bothered him. Some people appear to have reacted adversely to withdrawal: When Nguyen took the game down, he started receiving death threats that looked only half-facetious.

Yannick LeJacq explores the murky concept of videogame addiction:

“Addiction” might not be a physiological phenomenon in video games the same way it is for coffee, cigarettes, or heroin. But the word, perhaps for want of a better descriptor, has a special meaning for many game developers.

While talented and charismatic entrepreneurs like King’s Tommy Palm don’t exactly go around encouraging people to mainline Candy Crush, they speak openly and enthusiastically about the most artless sounding parts of their games—user acquisition, retention, and spending—all with the focus of how to increase those values.

And that’s fine. But there’s another camp of people who think that people like Tommy Palm are out to destroy video games as an art form. We’re finally able to create majestic, cinematic works like Journey and The Last of Us, the reasoning goes, but now smartphone games are trying to plunge games as we know them back into the muck and mire of slot machines.

Suddenly, artistic concerns become ethical ones.

Of course, the Flappy Bird clones have already arrived, including some that scam players:

According to researchers at Trend Micro, Android-based Flappy Bird clones are “especially rampant in app markets in Russia and Vietnam,” and look exactly like the original. The scam they run is pretty straightforward: the new apps require permission to send text messages—something the real Flappy Bird didn’t require—and use that newfound power to send texts to premium numbers that charge the subscriber a fee.

Silver is worse:

Research suggests that in the Olympics, those who finish third are likely to be a lot happier than those who finish second. The reason is that much of our thinking is based on counterfactuals. We like to ask: What else could have happened?

If you finish second, you tend to think that with a little good luck, or maybe a bit of extra effort or skill, you might have gotten the prize of a lifetime: Olympic gold. But if you finish third, you tend to think that with a little bad luck, or without that extra effort or skill, you wouldn’t have gotten the prize of a lifetime: an Olympic medal.

Update from a reader:

Did you ever hear Jerry Seinfeld’s take on this? Very funny:

A photo of the protests in Sarajevo yesterday. Courtesy of my family who are still there. #Bosnia pic.twitter.com/Wxg66uR7TD

— Marina Dovey (@D0Marina) February 12, 2014

Merdijana Sadović summarizes the latest:

What started earlier last week as peaceful demonstrations by unemployed workers in the town of Tuzla – one of the main industrial hubs in pre-war Bosnia – turned into the worst violence this country has seen since the end of the conflict. Within a few days, the unrest had spread to other cities in the Federation, the larger of Bosnia’s two administrative entities, which is populated mainly by Bosniaks and Croats. The other entity created by the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement which ended the war is the Serb-majority Republika Srpska (RS), which largely escaped the protests.

While most Bosnians sympathized with the protesters’ fury about unemployment and rampant corruption, as well as their demands for local officials to resign, they were taken aback by the violence, as government buildings in Tuzla, Sarajevo, Zenica and Mostar were set ablaze. Dozens of people were injured, most of them police officers protecting these buildings.

Harriet Salem sheds some light on the reasons for the unrest:

Ostensibly, the protests can be linked to widespread public discontent over Bosnia’s rampant unemployment and beleaguered economy. Nationwide, joblessness stands at 44.5 percent; it is a staggering 60 percent in the 15-to-24-year-old age bracket. The average wage is around $545 per month – one of the lowest in Europe.

But these economic woes are fueled by a much more deep-seated problem: a political system mired in corruption and nepotism.

In the aftermath of the Bosnian War, dodgy backroom deals to dole out businesses nationalized during the socialist era – including the Tuzla factories – were some of the first examples of the long list of dubious tactics deployed by the political elite to line their own pockets. Often sold under favorable conditions to the cronies of politicians, the businesses had new bosses who were frequently either incompetent or outright crooked. The resulting combination of inefficient management, skimming, and the state turning a blind eye to it all drove several vitally important local industries to the point of collapse

Joshua Keating adds, “the political paralysis that led to the current crisis is certainly related to the compromise that ended the war”:

[T]he political paralysis that led to the current crisis is certainly related to the compromise that ended the war. The Dayton Accords, which ended the war in 1995, were designed to divide power among the Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. In practice, as a 2011 Reuters feature put it, the deal “split the country into two autonomous, ethnically based regions so decentralized and unwieldy that Bosnia barely functions at the state level.” …

The Dayton Accords may have been the best deal available at the time, and negotiators including the late U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke certainly deserve credit for helping to end the bloodshed. But in the name of stopping the fighting, the agreement put off questions of how the cobbled-together nation was supposed to function as a state. Twenty years later, those chickens seem to be coming home to roost.